Some of animal behavior can be explained by appeal to their internal or
mental representations. For example, it is usually agreed that rats are
capable of path integration (even in complete darkness, and when
immersed in a water maze) because they maintain a cognitive map of
their environment. Exactly how and why neural states give rise to
mental representations is a matter of an ongoing debate. The purpose of
my talk is to show that anticipatory mechanisms involved in rats’
cognitive maps meet Ramsey’s (2007) “job description challenge”: it is
clear in what way they are representationally relevant for explaining
and predicting rats behavior.

First, I introduce the idea of anticipatory representational
mechanisms, which is used to analyze the current research in ethology,
cognitive science, and neuroscience. Representational mechanisms
(Mi?kowski, 2013) have at least the following capacities: (a) referring
to the target (if any) of the representation; (b) identifying the
characteristics target; (c) evaluating the epistemic value of
information about the target. While the first two capacities bear close
resemblance to traditional notions of extension and intension, the
third one is supposed to link the representational mechanism with the
work of the agent or system that peruses it.

Such mechanisms are representational in that that they enable the
system to detect that it is in error (via evaluation of the epistemic
value) and they are prone to misidentification of targets because of
the referential opacity. Both aspects, namely system-detectable error
and referential opacity, are the basis for the causal relevance of
content in representational mechanisms.

The anticipatory representational mechanisms have an additional
capacity to anticipate the future characteristics of the represented
target. Anticipatory capacities are posited widely in current cognitive
science (Pezzulo, 2008, 2011) and they have deep connections with
Rosen’s anticipatory systems (Rosen, 1991, 2012). I will claim that
anticipatory mechanisms in my sense meet Ramsey’s challenge, and that
taxis behavior in animals does not. This suggests that the presence of
anticipation is also strong evidence for the presence of representation
in observed animals. In particular, the role of error detection (for
which there is partial neurological evidence in rats) will be stressed.